Syracuse, N.Y. -- We talk a lot about record-breaking
attendance at the New York State Fair
, but they're always records of the
most
people who attended. What about the flip side: What was the lowest single-day attendance ever? The lowest attendance for the entire fair?

To find out, we dug through the state fair's
online attendance data
, which goes back to 1972. Comparisons and records can be a little fuzzy. The fair grew from seven to 10 to 11 to 12 days. And the attendance figures were, to be charitable,
grossly inflated by free tickets
and other gimmicks until just a few years ago.

With those caveats in mind, we tackled the question: What was the
worst-attended day
of the state fair in the past 42 years?

Irene dumped 1.11 inches of rain on Syracuse that day; starting at 5 a.m., it rained for 13 straight hours. You have to give credit to those 27,202 hardy souls who turned out that day. (If you were among them, tell us in the comments below. Bonus points if you provide photos; double for an umbrella receipt.)

A couple of footnotes:

The lowest single-day attendance figure is actually 23,896, set on Aug. 23, 1990. We didn't count that one, though, because it was a preview night the first year the fair switched to it's current 12-day format.

Technically, the lowest attendance ever at the fair on any day was zero. The fair was
canceled on Labor Day 1998
following an early morning storm with winds of 115 mph. The fairgrounds were damaged and two people were killed there.

The other big question: What was the least-attended fair overall?

Answer: 1991, with 825,379 total fairgoers. And remember that this was the era of attendance hyperinflation, so it was probably even lower.

It's hard to say why 1991 was so low. The weather probably didn't help: For six days in a row, high temperatures were 87 to 93 degrees. On the hottest day, a Post-Standard reporter measured the temperature on the midway at 106.4.

One more footnote: Records show the lowest attendance for an entire fair was actually 490,757. That was in 1975, though, when the fair ran just seven days. We looked at only the 12-day fairs for total attendance numbers.

To give some perspective, the biggest one-day attendance was Labor Day last year, when admission was $1 and 122,870 people came through the gates. The best-attended fair ever was 2001, with 1,011,248.